ART CITIES:London-Flora Yukhnovich
Flora Yukhnovich’s paintings trace connections between a visual language originating in the Rococo with contemporary popular culture, examining and questioning how notions of femininity, taste and beauty have been encoded and restated throughout art history before becoming entrenched within the contemporary aesthetic. The diverse sources for her work are drawn from the 18th Century French painting, but are filtered through references to contemporary fashion and music imagery, glossy magazines targeted at young girls, or the packaging of Barbie dolls and Disney toys.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Parafin Archive
Flora Yukhnovich’s research revolves around a series of binary positions: feminine and masculine, low and high culture, good and bad taste. To address these ideas she repurposes the motifs, palette and painterly gestures of an aesthetically contentious moment in the history of art, the Rococo. As an artist working in the 21st Century the works of Fragonard, Boucher and Watteau and the cultural freight they carry become a vehicle for her ideas, rather than the sole focus of them. The series of new paintings shown at her solo exhibition “Sweet Spot” navigate a terrain between figuration and abstraction. While motifs such as trees, putti and aspects of the female form are recognisable, they are indeterminate, dissolving in fluid passages of vibrant and painterly mark-making. For Yukhnovich paint is a physical and sensual medium as well as a tool for cultural reflection. Through her images Yukhnovich explores aesthetic codes, specifically the ways in which painted images encrypt and reinforce gendered positions. Central to her investigation is the gendering of the color pink. The exhibition also includes a series of smaller studies on paper. Made as part of her preparatory process alongside the larger paintings, the studies are pared down responses to works in the historical canon, painted rapidly as a strategy for reducing color and composition to its essence, and as a way of refining and rehearsing gesture and palette and exploring questions of composition in preparation for the larger works.
Info: Parafin, 18 Woodstock Street, London, Duration: 8/2-30/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.parafin.co.uk
